Work Stress is Bad for Your Health

If you’re feeling stressed at work, it turns out it may actually be bad for your long-term health. Researchers from Harvard and Stanford found that work stress can be as bad for you as secondhand smoke.

Joel Goh, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Stafanos Zenios teamed up to analyze 228 studies to come up with their findings. They looked at 10 factors, including things like low job security, long working hours, low levels of fairness at work and high job demands.

They then measured how those factors influenced multiple things: self-diagnosed physical and mental health, doctor diagnosed issues and death. Surprisingly, the analysis was able to predict our future health issues as much as if we were exposed to secondhand smoke.

In fact, over 120,000 deaths and $190 billion in health care costs every year are attributed to stress from the workplace.

It’s interesting to think about how seriously we take smoking, but how normal work stress seems. When stressed, many people turn to thinks like cigarettes, food and alcohol. Those behaviors can lead to increased health problems.